You’ve promised your sweetheart a weekend of unforgettable romance. You’ve chosen Venice, Paris or Rome, the dream destinations for lovers: sultry, spontaneous, charged with timeless glamour. Expectations are high.

And there’s the danger. These are big, crowded cities, whose sensual side can be elusive. Sultry and spontaneous can also mean sticky and confusing. Charged with timeless glamour? Charged with rip-off prices, more like. If you’re not careful, your break could turn out like bad lovemaking: a hurried build-up, lots of huffing and puffing, ultimately unsatisfying.

But we’re here to help. We sent our writers to these fountainheads of amour to find three fail-safe prescriptions for romance.

Venice

If Venice were a lover, she’d be just the sort your friends warn you against: jaw-droppingly attractive, but a tease, a flighty flibbertigibbet, a heartbreaker. You can find real romance here, but you’ve got to catch her in the right mood.

The perfect day: between the hours of 10am and 6pm, Venice is, frankly, a tart. She’s happy to surrender her charms to a horde of drooling tourists, upwards of 50,000 of them a day, outnumbering the pigeons in St Mark’s Square.

The answer, of course, is to swap human tides for natural ones and get out on the water. This is the way the city was built to be seen – and there are two good ways of doing it and one bad way. Don’t, but don’t, take a gondola. You’ll feel like a prize idiot, being barrage-photographed by Japanese tourists while jammed in front of a sardonic man with a pole giving you a bad rendition of O Sole Mio (which is Neapolitan, anyway) before charging you £55 for 40 minutes in a gondola-jam.

Go for a vaporetto instead: the waterborne equivalent of a public bus, and often considerably tattier, they can be romantic if you get them right. Board at the first stop of your chosen route – that’s Piazzale Roma for the classic Vaporetto 1 route up the Grand Canal – so you can get a good seat outdoors at the prow or stern and avoid the crush amidships.

The best bet, though, is taking to the canals under your own steam. It’s remarkably easy to do. Stroll down to Brussa (00 39-041 715787, www.brussaisboat.it), next to the Cannaregio canal on Fondamenta Labia, and hire a boat (£17 an hour). The buzzy outboards aren’t hard to handle – they’ll give you a brief test before they set you loose – and in no time you can be puttering along the tranquil backwaters of Santa Croce and Dorsoduro, passing palazzo after palazzo in various stages of picturesque dilapidation, before mooring up for a prosecco at a tiny waterside cafe. Now that is romantic.

Afterwards, hop three vaporetto stops south along the Grand Canal for lunch at Trattoria alla Madonna (041 52 23 824, www.ristorantealla madonna.com): beamed ceilings, uniformed waiters and a fegato alla veneziana (£8) that’s nothing short of lubricious.

And the afternoon? Back to your fabulously romantic hotel for... well, a snooze, or whatever you will.

The perfect evening: Venice is most seductive when she slips on her night attire – lamplight reflects in still water, wavelets wash against crumbling palazzos, lovers’ footsteps tap on centuries-old bridges. A simple stroll here is worth any number of candlelit dinners elsewhere.

Start from Rio di San Trovaso, near the Accademia bridge, and work your way vaguely north. Lost already? Inevitable, and fine. Just wander, and find your own favourite backwater – it’s all good.

Your target, though, is up by the Rialto, where dinner awaits. At night, the Campo San Giacomo di Rialto is ravishing, and it’s host to Naranzaria (041 724 1035), a cracking late-night restaurant with an enterprising menu: from cicchetti (Venetian tapas), for a pound or two, to weird concoctions such as pumpkin soup with prawns and amaretto biscuits (£9.50). The tables out back have a prime spot bang on the Grand Canal. If you don’t feel like lovesick puppies after a meal here, there’s no hope for you. The perfect night: you can wander and wonder till the wee hours, but at some point you’ll need to rest your head – and if you want real romance, it won’t be cheap. But it’ll be worth it.

The waterside bar at the Gritti Palace (041 794611, www.starwood.com/gritti) is the most romantic bellini stop in town – and if you’ve arranged your second mortgage, you can head straight upstairs. Built in 1525, this place is a genuine doge’s palace, but take care that you’re not in the servants’ quarters. The best bet is room 115 (from £480 per night): all antique drapes and original oils, plus an old stone balcony overlooking the Grand Canal. The doges were a pretty debauched lot, and this is the perfect setting to continue the tradition.

If less drama but more intimacy lights your romantic candle, you can knock three-quarters off the price. Everything about the 12-room Locanda Orseolo (041 520 4827, www.locandaorseolo.com; from £105) is a delight, from Barbara Peruch’s family welcome, to the snug sitting room with its own water entrance from the canal. Sorry to gush, but it’s a find.

Travel details: airlines flying to Venice Marco Polo airport include BMI (0870 607 0555, www.flybmi.com), British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com), EasyJet (www.easyjet.com) and Jet2 (0871 226 1737, www.jet2.com). From there, cruise by boat to St Mark’s Square for £8. Locanda Orseolo doesn’t deal with tour operators, but the Gritti Palace does. Thomson (0870 606 1476, www.thomson.co.uk/cities) isn’t the most romantic name in the business, but its prices – £435pp, B&B, for a Friday and Saturday night at the Gritti, including flights and transfers – are extremely alluring compared with the rack rate. SB

Paris

There is a permanent air of Valentine’s Day about Paris. The tables are too close together, the portions are a touch dainty, and everywhere you look there are couples trying gamely to stare into each other’s limpid pools, ignoring the nagging sensation that they’re being smoothly, elegantly ripped off. The £4 café crème, the £200-a-night broom cupboard... the crimes passionels go on.

The situation, though, is far from insoluble – love, like cigarette smoke, still hangs liberally in the air here and, if you choose your extravagances wisely, Paris can confer more than enough magic to launch a honeymoon, an engagement or just a memorable fling in unimprovable style.

The perfect day: let’s avoid the most common mistake, overambition, which risks quashing the romance with sore feet and too many Métro journeys. Paris rewards the lazy and punishes the industrious, and it’s important to choose the most famously indolent part of town, the Latin Quarter and St-Germain-des-Prés, as the epicentre of your lovers’ break. So instead of charging to Montmartre at dawn, begin with a stroll in the loveliest garden in town, at the Rodin Museum (Rue de Varenne; admission £4, be there for 9.30am), where you can contemplate the fiery affair with a younger woman that inspired the great man’s work.

Next, as food is obviously the food of love round here, potter to Rue Mouffetard’s morning market, where regional delicacies wait to be nibbled – Cave La Bourgogne, at the bottom end of the hill, is a lovely time-wasting cafe.

Nearby is the park that best captures the civility of the city: the Jardin du Luxembourg, where the citoyens simply pull up chairs and chat. After a turn around there, it’ll be lunchtime. Rue de Buci’s parade of eateries somehow retains the artsy pretension of the Latin Quarter’s low-rent past, and Parisians adore them. The choice is excellent, but the Bar du Marché (mains from £8) wins the popular vote.

Now, stroll the Seine. The Jardin des Plantes isn’t much cop as a horticultural endeavour, but it makes the ideal quiet route to the start of the riverside path, offering perfect views of the islands as you follow the Left Bank. And if the mood really takes you, consider a brief foray to the other side, and the astonishing jewellery boutiques of Place Vendôme. But remember, ladies, when a man is tired of Paris, he is tired of shops.

The perfect evening: now’s the time to be extravagant. The dim dining room at Lapérouse (51 Quai des Grands-Augustins; 00 33-1 43 26 68 04, booking essential) is sultry enough, but book one of its private chambers – wood-panelled boudoirs with an air of prerevolutionary petticoat-rustling – and frankly, chaps, you’re either married already, carrying the ring, or you’re doomed. Dinner is set at £80 a head plus wine, plus that fat diamond.

If that’s too steep, Le Reminet (3 Rue des Grands-Degrés; 01 44 07 04 24) is a cosy, shamelessly traditional and sanely priced bistro, with mains from £14.

After dinner, Paris’s revived jazz scene offers yet more treats. Just done up, Le Bilboquet (13 Rue St-Benoit; 01 45 48 81 84, jazzclub.bilboquet.free.fr) is all bordello-burgundy velvet and silk, with tables outside or (better still) on a balcony above the band, which strikes up at 9ish.

And so to bed? Not a chance – sleep tomorrow. The midnight stroll is a Parisian speciality, all echoing footsteps and loosened ties.

The perfect night: to live your bohemian fantasies for a weekend, you’ll need a Parisian roof terrace. The finest belong to the decadent split-level suites at the outstanding Hôtel de l’Abbaye (01 45 44 38 11, www.hotelabbayeparis.com; £280 a night), but the Hôtel Duc de Saint-Simon (01 44 39 20 20, www.hotelducdesaint simon.com; from £150 a night) has lovely doubles with private patios for those dream breakfasts.

For tighter budgets, the Hôtel des Grandes Ecoles (01 43 26 79 23, www.hotel-grandes-ecoles.com; doubles from £75) has a lovely quiet courtyard and equally lovely people. Travel details: Eurostar (0870 518 6186, www.eurostar.com) has weekend returns from Waterloo from £59, but love is... stumping up the £149 for the Leisure Select fare, securing her the legroom and the meal. Alternatively, airlines flying to Paris include Air France (0870 142 4343, www.airfrance.co.uk), BA (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) and Flybe (0871 522 6100, www.flybe.com). BS

Rome

The couple in the bar at the Hotel d’Inghilterra are canoodling. Actually, canoodling isn’t the right word: this is mouth-to-mouth mauling – hair mussed, lipstick smudged, his hand inside her Roberto Cavalli hipsters. On neighbouring tables, Camparis clink and waiters arch an eyebrow. It wouldn’t do at the Dorchester, but this is Rome. Embrace it.

The perfect day: the horse-drawn cabs may look romantic as they clop beneath the Spanish Steps, but don’t be tempted. Within minutes of boarding, you’ll be dodging along the Via del Corso, high on Fiat fumes and fear. It feels like hang-gliding into the Battle of Britain.

Instead of that, just roam. Start with a double-espresso hit of Roman street life in the flower market on the Campo de’ Fiori. Here, pastel-painted palazzos press in around the square and shouty market traders moisten their blooms in the old fountain. Its inscription, “Do well and let them talk”, sums up the chutzpah of Rome – and works nicely for illicit lovers, too. Sip a blood-orange spremuta in a piazza cafe, and explain to your soulmate why Giordano Bruno, the martyr on the plinth, was wrong to argue there is no centre to the universe: “Because you’re it, honey.” (On second thoughts...)

How far can you trust your beloved, though? Find out by wandering the idiosyncratic alleys of the Jewish quarter, towards the Teatro di Marcello. Just south of here is the Bocca della Verita, “Mouth of Truth”, the city’s legendary lie-detector for doubting lovers. A marble mask dating from imperial Rome, it looks scary (think Bill Oddie on a bad hair day) and exacts gory punishment if you put your mitt in its maw and falsely pledge devotion. As Peck and Hepburn discovered in Roman Holiday, the Bocca will literally bite your hand off. Better not risk it, perhaps.

Just round the corner, lunch is waiting in the most loved-up little square in Old Rome, at Trattoria San Teodoro (Via dei Fienili 49-51; 00 39-06 678 0933). From there, it’s a hand-in-hand stroll through the Roman Forum to the Colosseum, once the slaughter pit of emperors, now the world’s most romantic promenade.

After you’ve made your circuit, explore the exhibition halls, currently celebrating the enigma of Eros (until September 9). Friezes, frescoes and busts illustrate in eyewatering fashion how, before he became the pudgy putto familiar from Renaissance art, the love god was an altogether sexier figure, organising debauched parties throughout antiquity. Altogether more Roman, in fact.

Steamy stuff. Cool off by picking your way back through the Forum towards the Trevi Fountain, where Il Gelato di San Crispino (Via Della Panetteria 42) scoops out Rome’s most orgasmic ices. For maximum sinfulness, share a tub of zabaione, laced with 20-year-old Marsala – or else the stunning liquorice flavour, “recommended to improve vitality, desire and ecstasy before the sexual act”.

Time for a lie-down. The route to your hotel (see below) is through the cobbled catwalks of the Tridente quarter, impeccably chic since the days when Casanova downed coffees at the Caffe Greco (Via Condotti 84). You’ll pass Gucci, Pucci, Cavalli and Moschino – why not pick up a gift for you both at Brighenti (Via Frattina 7-8), high altar of lingerie di lusso.

The perfect evening: start by lounging among the lovers on the Spanish Steps – right on the doorstep of the Hotel d’Inghilterra and immaculately positioned for sunset-watching.

Above the steps, via Via Sistina, is the city’s most sensual dining room – La Terrazza, on the top floor of the Hotel Eden (Via Ludovisi 49; 06 478121). This is dinner as opera: jewelled food, twirling waiters and a front-row view of St Peter’s and the Pantheon, spotlit (you feel) just for you. Foie gras with truffles, veal cheek with saffron... it’s expensive (£80pp for the seven-course gourmet menu), and so good that you’ll need to book long before you leave home.

Later, a choice of moonlit flits. For solitude, stroll through the Pincio Gardens for a clinch on the belvedere in Piazzale Napoleone, the whole city swimming at your feet; then descend for cocktails at Rosati (till 11.30pm; Piazza del Popolo 5), Rome’s smartest late-night rendezvous ever since art nouveau was new, in 1922.

For sentimentality, aim south to the Trevi Fountain. At night, the Mexican wave of tourists has washed away, and all that remains is cooing couples and a few marauding rose-sellers. Dealing with them is easy: give in immediately, clap your stem between your lover’s teeth, and hotfoot it back to the hotel.

The perfect night: if you’ve movie-star cachet (and cash), you could do as Diaz and DiCaprio do, and hole up at the Hotel Eden (www.starwood hotels.com). Its new penthouse is at once discreet and dizzying (no pillow in Rome has a better view) – but a night there costs a potentially passion-killing £5,000.

The Hotel d’Inghilterra (06 699811, www.royaldemeure. com) comes a close second for old-time elegance: smack in the couture district on blinging Via Borgognona, it started life as a guesthouse for Princess Torlonia in the 1600s, and still looks the part. Downstairs is a series of seductive salons; upstairs, vast beds and shuttered balconies teetering among the rooftops. Doubles start from £220, B&B.

Travel details: airlines flying to Rome include Alitalia (0870 544 8259, www.alitalia.com), BA (0870 850 9850, www.ba. com) and Air One (020 8939 2434, www.flyairone.it).

Kirker (0870 112 3333, www.kirkerholidays.com) offers three nights in Rome, including flights from London, private transfers and B&B in a deluxe room at the Hotel d’Inghilterra, from £943pp – or four nights for the price of three, if one is Sunday. VC

Brian Schofield travelled as a guest of Eurostar; Vincent Crump was a guest of Kirker

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